


The Truth About Monsters

by Ceallaigh



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Dark fic, F/M, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Reylo Fanfiction Anthology, Slow Burn, Violence (mostly implied), Warnings May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-03-18 15:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13684608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceallaigh/pseuds/Ceallaigh
Summary: So when you seea monster next,always remember this.Do not fearthe thing before you.Fear the thingthat created itInstead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChromiumHeart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChromiumHeart/gifts).



> Valentine’s treat for Chromiumheart. Will post the prompts she requested when I get a little more into this fic.
> 
> Hop aboard the Kylo Pain Train. Most definitely darker than my usual work, but I accepted the challenge specifically to work outside my comfort zone!
> 
> More chapters to drop very soon!!
> 
> Comments, critiques always welcome!

The Truth About Monsters

  
The truth is this,  
every monster  
you have met  
or ever will meet  
was once a human being  
with a soul  
that was as soft  
and light  
as silk.

  
Someone stole  
that silk from their soul  
and turned them  
into this.

  
So when you see  
a monster next,  
always remember this.  
Do not fear  
the thing before you.  
Fear the thing  
that created it  
Instead.

Nikita Gill

 

  
The war was just beginning. What began on Crait had only grown. A handful of survivors that fled in the Falcon multiplied into a hundred, which in turn grew into over a thousand by the time the Resistance hid in plain sight right in the Core nearly a year later. While the First Order reigned, it apparently never thought to look right under its nose to find the ragtag group of rebels plotting to unravel its stranglehold on the galaxy.

Selonia’s elaborate underwater caverns and dens dated back millenia and provided the perfect place to hide beneath the planet’s watery depths. With the constant flurry of activity of ships coming and going from the planet’s orbital shipyard above, the chaos provided the perfect cover.

  
Of course it helped that the Order’s fledgling Supreme Leader would never consider that the Resistance would ever be as bold as to hide in his father’s home system.

  
Selonia had been a place to lick festering wounds, heal and find its resolve once again. For a while, that sun that General Organa had promised would always return on the eastern horizon had seemed so far away, as if it would never again rise. And when she had quietly passed in her sleep, that dawn seemed like an impossible dream for those like Rey who desperately searched for hope to be rekindled once again.

  
But that dawn always appeared, even it was thousands of meters above the Den, as the base had been named. The sun always rose, and when one fell in that pursuit of freedom, there was always another ready to take his or her place.  
With that Rey found her resolve. She and her friends had little time to mourn the general’s death. Rather they chose to honor her by keeping her hopes and dreams alive. Good always prevailed over evil, Leia had once told her with the confidence that only she could convey.

And it was with that sense of purpose that they kept their eyes on the horizon.  
It’s what kept Rey grounded after they had lost so very much. But now the Resistance had began to emerge like a phoenix from the ashes, there was was no time to dwell on the past. There was too much work to get done, and never enough hours in the day to accomplish it.

  
Some days she busied herself ripping apart dead cruisers that recon teams would scavenge from the shipyards above, skillfully extracting the useful calcinators, hyperdrive motivators and nuclear converters before declaring the rest nothing more than scrap to be repurposed.

  
Rey cursed under her breath as she ripped open the skin on her knuckles. Elbow deep in a long-dead sub-light cruiser’s rear thruster, she yanked the concentrator from its firing core out of the hull before she sucked on the bleeding finger.

  
Holding it up to her work partner, she asked, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  
Rose Tico grabbed the part and turned it over before answer, “Thanks! Now let’s just hope it will work in an A-Wing. Maker knows we need more birds in the sky than down here.”

  
Rey scrambled down the ladder with Rose following close behind. They had been scavenging parts all morning, and her stomach was beginning to rumble. It was time for a break, and the mess hall was calling her name. Rose tossed her a rag, and she tried the best to wipe the grease off her hands before they headed across the hangar.

  
As they crossed the undeground tarmac, a transport descended from above stirred up the dirt and debris that had built up on the duracrete floor. Rey closed her eyes and looked away as it began its final descent as the wind swirled around her.

  
She shielded her face with her forearm until the transport came to a stop and powered down. Rey watched as the door lowered and two Resistance soldiers helped an injured comrade disembark and make his way to the waiting med team that had met the returning ship.

Several more from the strike team exited before Rey called out, “Where are you coming from?”

  
“Naboo,” one of them called back as he hopped on the ground shuttle. “Took out an officer’s shuttle!”

  
They were the special ops team Rey realized as she watched them continue to stream out. She’d heard they were out on mission, but it had been under such a cover of secrecy that she would likely never know the details. Rumor had it that the First Order’s High Command had been gathering on the Midcore planet and that the Resistance had wanted to strike when they were the most vulnerable.

  
She’d been the injured and wounded before, and the sight of bloodied soldiers was nothing new to her. But what she wasn’t prepared to see what streamed out of the transport next--nearly a dozen captured members of the First Order that were blindly pulled from the shuttle, their heads shrouded in black hoods. Each had been stripped of rank or individuality.

Dressed in boxy, thin drab prisoner uniforms, they were shackled together at the ankles and waists, forming a snaking line that armed Resistance guards guided into the hangar. What looked like identification cuffs peeked out from under the stunbinders on each of their right wrists.

All were human, of course. The First Order looked down on other sentients like the Empire before it. They shuffled along until the second in the line stumbled and fell to his knees.

  
“Get up!” a Resistance soldier shouted as grabbed the prisoner by the arm and yanked him to a stand.

  
As the guards directed the prisoners to the ground shuttle, Rey turned to Rose and asked, “When did we start taking prisoners?” It was the first time she had seen prisoners of war, and the idea was still foreign to her.

  
Rose shrugged. “Since we started winning battles, I guess.”

  
The prisoner line caught her eye one more time as one of the guards yelled, “I said move it!” As the chain started moving. They looked exhausted.

  
“What do you think will happen to them?” she asked.

  
Rose peeled her work gloves off and tucked them into her belt before she answered. “If they’re officers,” she said, “they’ll probably be interrogated. The may have information that could help us.”

  
“I guess,” Rey replied as she started to pack up her gear. It was a long day, and she was ready to head to the mess hall. There would be more time tomorrow to scavenge for spare parts.

  
o.o.o.o.o

  
Three days later, Rey was covered in grime as she headed to the shower. She yearned for the sun. The subterranean base’s artificial daylight was a poor substitute. Days were spent breaking down dead fighters, leaving little time to even attempt to understand one of the many Jedi texts she had taken with her from Ahch-To and even less to relax with her friends.

  
But the First Order was still smarting from their loss on Naboo, and there was no time rest.

  
Rey grabbed her towel and her sleep clothes as she made her way to the communal refresher. After a long day, a hot hydro in the shower still felt like a decadent treat. She smiled at the two officers exiting as she entered the fresher. It was late, and only a few stalls were full, the sound of water flowing filling the the steamy confines. It was the antithesis of everything she had known on Jakku. On the worst of days, a five minute hydro was a brief respite from the daily grind of the Resistance base.

  
She entered one of the empty stalls and started stripping out of her jumpsuit as soon as the lock engaged. She turned the water on before she pulled the single hair tie from her hair and wrapped it around her wrist. The water was just this side of scalding, and Rey turned it down just a bit before stepping into the stream and willing her muscles to relax. If hours on end twisted around dead ship components tied her into uncomfortable knots, the warm stream from the shower was the remedy that worked every time.

  
She had the five minute routine down to a science. Rey efficiently scrubbed the grease and dirt from hours on end in the body of a bomber from her body before turning her attention to the standard-issue shampoo.

  
The fresher was one of the few places she could let her mind wander. It was her time, not the Resistance’s. It’s where the bond would occasionally flicker open. It was never enough to actually see Kylo for more than a fleeting second or two, but she still wondered if he even knew that his mother had died in her sleep. He was still the enemy. But she knew too well the loneliness he now knew. She knew first hand the void where parents once were, and couldn’t help feel for him.

  
Sometimes she would see him poring over reports on his datapad. Other times she’d briefly catch him sleeping. He never let on to her presence, and she wasn’t even certain if he could see her.

  
In a way, she was thankful the bond would not stay open for long. What would she even say to him? It didn’t matter, she supposed. They were on opposite sides of the war. Yet she secretly cherished these moments. They were comforting reminders that he was safe, that he was still alive. But the bond hadn’t opened in over two weeks. It had been one of the longer stretches, and she felt his absence.

  
Rey started to rinse the shampoo from her hair and let the water sluice down her back when she heard it. It sounded like a man’s voice over the noise of the hydro. She untangled her hair under the water stream as she heard it again. A man wordlessly called out.

  
“Get a room!” she called over the din. The last thing she wanted was to be an uninvited third wheel in a hydro-fueled tryst. “At least let me clear out first!”

  
She quickly rinsed off one more time before turning her hydro off. Rey grabbed her towel and wrapped it around her body. Normally she would dress there, but she wasn’t in the mood to run into anyone she may have interrupted.

  
With the water off, the voice became clearer. It wasn’t a cry of ecstasy.

  
It was a scream.

  
There was no mistaking his voice. Somewhere Ben Solo was in agony, his pain echoing with his cries against four walls of the fresher.

  
But the bond didn’t feel right. It didn’t hum with the energy it normally did. It felt as if something was muting it.

  
Rey nearly jumped out of her skin the next time she heard him scream. His voice was ragged, and the strength of it was starting to flag. She left her clothes in the stall and tried to follow his voice. She’d retrieve them later. Right now her only priority was finding where the bond had opened, and with that, him.

  
He didn’t beg. He didn’t plead for it to stop. Ben cried out again as some unknown entity extracted pain.

  
Rey tightened the towel wrapped around her and followed his cries to the line of sinks. It felt like he should be right there, but there was no one, not even his projected image.

  
“Where are you, Ben?” she whispered to no one.

  
He answered with a weak cry and a groan before the glowpanels above flickered for a moment and the vestiges of the bond closed off entirely leaving Rey shivering and alone in the empty fresher.

  
o.o.o.o.o

  
Somewhere in a stuffy room, the acrid tang of ozone mixed with the stale smell of sweat. Electricity crackled in the air before the conductor made contact with a bare shoulder once again. Muscles seized up and pain tore through his body, ripping yet another scream from his throat.

  
He had no idea how long he’d been in the tiny room with his captors, and he lost count of how many times they had struck him with their fists and shocked him with the prod. Kylo was beyond exhausted, and the only reason he remained upright were the chains holding his arms over his head.

  
Everything hurt. His head pounded. His shoulders felt like they were stretched to the limit. Blood trickled out of his nostril and down to his chin, dripping on to his chest every time his head slumped forward. There was nothing more that he wanted to do than sleep, but his jailers hadn’t let him as much as nod off in days. To do so would make the agony even worse. He knew he couldn’t eat, sleep or even take a shit without their permission. There were consequences for everything, including sleep.

  
He tried once again in vain to reach out and tap into the Force. He needed its strength, because his own was failing quickly. But once again he only found the void where it should have been. He wasn’t sure how they managed it, but his captors had found a way to separate him from the Force. Without it, he was as mundane as the nameless thugs dressed in black that repeatedly beat him.

  
Kylo couldn’t help it. Fatigue crept through every fiber of of his body, and he allowed his eyes to close for just a moment. His head drooped forward. The inky blackness of oblivion called to him. But before he could nod off, someone grabbed his hair and yanked his head back, pressed the probe to his jaw and deployed the prod.

  
His jaw clenched as the voltage coursed through him. Kylo let out a strangled gasp before the world went black.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...The thing is, you've become so good at hiding  
>  that your soul is currently missing with no sign  
> of ever coming back, that no one realizes that  
> there is a blank space and a question mark  
> where that person they loved used to be.  
> If you stay silent and still enough,  
> no one notices you are a car crash waiting  
> to happen because no one is in the driver's seat.
> 
> Trigger Warning by Nikita Gill

There was something therapeutic about sneaking off to the makeshift gym the Resistance had set up in one of the caverns. A level down from the mess hall and residential barracks, it was off the beaten path. Late at night, it was always empty, and the perfect place Rey loved to seek out when she wanted to be alone.

Insomnia had been her unwanted bedfellow for nearly a week. Meditation hadn’t helped. Corellian whiskey, despite Poe’s best intentions earlier in the week, had only given her a headache. That left training in the gym as her last resort. Perhaps she could wear herself down until sleep would finally come.

She loved the hypnotic monotony of the gymnasium. It reminded her of the endless hours spent in the darkened belly of a downed star destroyer where time was marked in aching muscles and sweat dripping from her brow. There was something comforting about the routine. The world always seemed to slip away, and Rey was left with only her thoughts.

Tonight she focused on the heavy bag hanging from a durasteel beam. Sometimes she pictured herself sparring against Snoke’s faceless Praetorians that she couldn’t tell a soul about. Her trip to the First Order’s flagship was still a secret she had yet to share. It was better that way, she thought to herself as she spun and her foot made contact with the bag. Her friends didn’t need to know how she foolishly journeyed into the belly of the beast and stood before Snoke without a plan. They certainly didn’t need to know how she fought beside Kylo Ren as they were an unstoppable force of nature. And they would never understand how she begged him to leave with her or how he broke her heart when he did not. 

All they saw was the monster that hunted them down on Crait. They would never understand how she had seen beneath that terrifying exterior and found the frightened boy. How could her friends trust her if they knew she had been a heartbeat away from taking his hand? Where she saw loneliness and pain, they only saw treachery. Poe, Finn and even Rose would never understand. They’d brand her a traitor and turn their back on her like everyone else in her life had done.

She had traveled to the Supremacy. Rey wanted to hate him for it. She was such a fool, she silently chastised herself as her gloved fist connected with the bag, the quiet thud echoing off the walls of the sparring room. She drove her other fist into bag, her knuckles aching from the impact.

Rey imagined it was the faceless monsters that held Kylo captive that she was pummeling. He was supposed to hate him, but she couldn’t shake the way his screams echoed in the fresher nearly four months before. The bond had not opened since then, and she was left with more questions than answers. His own monsters had obviously turned on him, but they had done a great job keeping that a little secret.

Frustration and anger radiated off her, and she felt the darkness calling to her as she spun and delivered a punishing roundhouse kick to the waiting bag. 

Now that she had a name for it, she realized the dark was what kept her alive in many of a scrap on Jakku. It had often guided her staff or helped her land a sound kick when thieves tried to attack her.

She let out a wordless grunt as she met the bag with the heel of her hand. The force of the blow traveled all the way down her forearm to her elbow, and she welcomed the ache. The finesse of her sparring degraded into the brawling style she had favored as a child. 

Rey spat out a wordless battle cry, spinning once again to deliver a kick to the heavy bag sending it swinging wildly back. She didn’t need to look back as she called to her staff. If leapt from where she had left it in the corner of the room by her towel and bottle of water and flew to her hand. At the same time, she stilled the bag with her mind. In one fluid motion, she brought the point of her staff to the midsection of defenseless heavy bag. Had it been an opponent, she would have been a killing blow.

“Save that for the next time you face the Order,” Finn said as he grabbed the bag from behind. She had been so lost in her thoughts she hadn’t even heard him enter the room.

Rey lowered her staff and wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her other hand. She waited for her heartbeat to slow just a bit before she answered, “Didn’t see you come in!”

She tried her best to let a smile creep across her face and the darkness returned to the shadows once again. As much as she had loved being able to finally spend time with Finn and her other friends, she just wanted to be alone. Of course, they were always supportive, but they just wouldn’t understand what was going on. And she didn’t think she could even begin to explain it if they tried.

She tossed the staff toward her towel. It knocked her water bottle over in the process. Finn had helped her train in the past, and she waited before he leaned his weight into the bag to steady it before she delivered three quick jabs to it. She wasn’t done with her workout. If he wanted to talk, he was going to have to help out.

“We missed you tonight at the war council,” he said as he helped the bag absorb the blows. 

Rey landed a backhanded blow with the heel of her left hand before she answered, “Didn’t feel like talking about war.”

She stepped away from the heavy bag and leaned down for her towel. Draping it around her neck, she blotted the sweat from her face with one of its ends. She didn’t want to talk about death. It was the one thing she hadn’t signed on for when she finally admitted she was part of the Resistance. 

“Hopefully this war won’t drag on for much longer,” Finn smiled. “Poe said we’re getting some really good intel from those officers we captured on Naboo. May even help us turn the tide.”

Rey peeled her sparring gloves off before she stooped down and picked up her water bottle. She unscrewed the cap and took a long drink from it. The water had that processed tang that was over-chlorinated and tasted like metal shavings after being recycled for the millionth time. It was one of the downsides of a base fathoms and fathoms beneath the sea. Nothing was fresh, including the drinking water. 

“Whatever happened to them?” she asked. The only time she’d seen them was when they were being led through the hangar.

“Intel has a containment center they’re calling the Corsuscant Cage,” he explained, all too eager to discuss the meeting she had skipped. 

“It’s not really a cage,” he continued. “It sounds like it is a set of townhouses in the Ambassadorial District. “

“That’s a pretty posh neighborhood,” Rey pointed out as she took another drink from her bottle. “You sure we’d be so foolish to hide prisoners there?”

She offered her a drink from her bottle. He waved her off before he said, “Not just housing them. It’s an interrogation center.”

“You mean we’re torturing them for information.”

A disgusted look spread across Finn’s face and he grimaced at her declaration. “Stars no,” he spat out. “That’s what the First Order does. We’re nothing like them!”

Rey headed to the mat and started to stretch. She really wasn’t in the mood to talk, especially about interrogating prisoners. She set her bottle down, spread her feet apart and bent down to grasp her right ankle. As she held the stretch, she asked, “So what exactly is this great intel they are getting?”

Finn smiled. She’d obviously asked the right question. If she wasn’t going to attend the meeting, he was going to bring the information to her.

“The First Order is secretly in disarray,” he explained. “Poe says those officers we nabbed on Naboo are singing. They’re saying there was some sort of coup that went down shortly before we captured them.”

Rey stood back up and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Apparently Hux declared himself Grand Marshall of the Order,” he answered. “Ren is gone. There’s no more Supreme Leader.”

That would definitely confirm what she had heard in the fresher.

“So what happened to Kylo Ren?” 

Rey reached out with her feelings and found an empty void. Normally she’d find his faint signature flickering in the darkness of her mind. But for the past four months, there was nothing, no gaping maw that tore open like she had felt when the General had died. He simply wasn’t there. His presence in the Force vanished, and all she had left were the sounds of agony and no real answers. 

Finn shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “My guess is Hux found a way to off him. I’m telling you, that Hux is bad news”

“He’s not dead,” Rey mused to herself out loud. She would’ve felt it. 

“How would you know?” he asked as she grasped her elbow and pulled her arm across her chest in a stretch.

“I don’t,” she answered. There was no way he would understand the bond she shared with Kylo. It was one secret she definitely needed to keep to herself. No one would understand, for that matter. “I think I would’ve known if he had died.”

Finn gave her skeptical glance, one that was filled with the beginnings of distrust. “What do you mean you would have known?”

“Force thing, I guess,” she tried to shrug off. Rey could feel that fight or flight response starting to form in the pit of her stomach. She’d already said too much. “I mean, I felt something when Luke Skywalker died. Felt it again when the General passed. It’s hard to explain, but I just knew when they both died.”

“Did you see them?” Finn asked. 

Rey quickly shook her head. Questions were hitting too close for comfort. “It’s not like that,” she tried to explain. “You know that feeling you get when there’s someone standing behind you, and you don’t see them but know they’re there?”

“I guess,” he replied.

“It’s like that,” she added.

Rey wanted to finish her workout. She really wasn’t in the mood to talk about the meeting she missed. Grabbing the jump rope, she paused and told Finn, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not in the mood for company.”

He nodded. His disappointment was palpable. But she had sought out the solace to of the gym to clear her head, and the last thing she wanted to do was rehash the depressing details of the war once more.

“I’m sorry, Finn,” she apologized. “I’m just horrid company right now. Let me finish up here, and I’ll make it up to you tomorrow at breakfast. 

“Sounds like a plan,” he answered with a smile. Finn always had this way of understanding. 

“Then I’ll see you at six-thirty,” she said leaning in and kissing his cheek. “Thank you for understanding.”

“Best time to get fresh pastries!” he bantered back. They both loved to be one of the first in the mess where the breads were still piping hot from the ovens. It was their time together to catch up. The tables were mostly empty, and the caf was always plenty. 

As he headed to the door and left, Rey started swinging her jump rope, silently counting the quickening cadence of the rope striking the floor with each skip. She settled into a steady rhythm and felt her heartbeat rise to meet it. Whatever had been putting her in a foul mood erased away as she surrendered to hypnotic repetition. 

In those moments of solitude, she tried to lose herself in the monotony as sweat beaded on her brow and gathered in the small of her back. It was always more successful than her attempts at meditation. Rey struggled to find clarity sitting cross-legged in her quarters, but here she was always able to sense the Force around her as soon as she opened her mind and cast a net that extended far beyond the gym.

Her friends and allies, she sensed them clustered in various pockets of the underwater base, but as she concentrated further she felt the life teaming in the ocean outside the caverns—giant cetaceans, schools of fish and even the bioluminescent jellies she had seen one night when had peered out one of the portals closer to the surface. Life was everywhere, and so was death that would feed the sea to produce more life. And weaving it all together was the Force. It filled the spaces in between and within. It was everywhere—surrounding her, filling her. It was exactly as Luke Skywalker had explained.

But just as soon as she had found that clarity in her gymnasium meditations, her ears popped as the sound around was sucked into a void of nothingness. She stumbled for a second, and the jump rope tangled around her foot, bringing her meditation to a screeching halt.

She knew the sensation. The Force bond had opened, and she immediately scanned her surroundings for Ben. 

Rey gasped as she turned around. His visage was there in the room with her, though he was likely thousands of light years away.

She was not prepared for what she saw. 

“Ben?” she gently called out to him, but he did not respond. 

Dressed in only a thin pair of drab shapeless pants—impersonal and likely detention block standard issue—he kneeled silently on the duracrete floor. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and he laced his fingers at the base of his skull, his elbows jutting out to the side of his head. A stress position, she silently reminded herself. She’d learn about them in her evasion, resistance and escape training that General Dameron had insisted she have under her belt. 

He looked absolutely exhausted, the muscles in his arms then his abdomen twitched as he struggled to maintain a statue-like rigidity. She had no idea how long he’d been kneeling in that position—likely hours if her training had taught her anything.

“Can you hear me?” she asked, taking a step closer to him but knowing he couldn’t answer. 

His tangled and unwashed hair hung limply around his bruised and battered face. A patchy beard on his chin had sprouted since the last time she had seen him. His left eye was nearly swollen shut, and dried blood rimmed his nostrils. A scabbed burn marred his chest that accompanied an angry purple bruise on his flank that suspiciously matched the size and shape of a boot print.

But the injuries were not the most shocking part of his image kneeling before her. The lean muscle that she had recalled had yielded to not much more than skin pulled tautly over sharp angles of bone. Rey could count his ribs, and his bony hips jutted above the loose waistband of his pants. His own who had turned on him had no intentions of executing him. Instead they were slowly starving him to death.

Rey stepped closer until she was standing right in front of him. He did not acknowledge her presence. “Where are you?” she asked, worried that he would vanish once again before she could learn more. 

He cast his gaze upward, and for a fleeting second, she thought he had heard her. But it became clear that he didn’t even see her as he looked past her with those haunted brown eyes as if someone much taller than her was standing behind her. 

He drew in a hitched breath as she noticed the nearly imperceptible tremble creep across his features. He lacked the simmering anger she had recalled when he’d plotted his master’s death. No, he was not angry. He was terrified. Whomever stood behind her had stripped away the bravado that allowed him to be Kylo Ren. All that was left was a cowering prisoner that did not want to incur his captor’s wrath.

He flinched and closed his eyes momentarily as a large glob of spit spattered onto his face, catching in his eyelashes on the left before sliding downward. He didn’t break his form and somehow managed to keep his hands anchored behind his head and acknowledged his own submission by casting his eyes downward.

“Reach out, Ben,” she begged, desperate for him to hear her plea. “I’ll help you. Just let me…”

Rey jumped with a start and let out a shriek as some unseen force—a boot or the butt of a rifle, it didn’t matter—propelled him forward and sent him crashing toward the floor. Instinctively she reached out to catch his fall, but there was nothing to grab. The phantom image of Ben Solo passed through her like a transparent holo projection, vanishing once again before it reached the gymnasium mat.

o.o.o.o.o

Kylo failed to catch himself before he slammed into duracrete floor. A muffled groan escaped his lips as the impact knocked the wind out of him. After holding that position for hours on end, his arms and legs felt useless and rubbery. He knew he needed to get back up, but his body silently screamed for a few moments of rest.

It had been days, possible a week, since the last time the guards had tossed a ration bar into his cell, and it would be even longer if he didn’t get back to his knees. He slowly pushed himself back up to assume the same position. No one had given him permission to break form. But before he could put his hands back behind his head, a guard from behind grabbed a large handful hair and yanked him back to his knees, and he winced in response. 

“Did I say you could take a break?” the guard bellowed.

He didn’t even try to answer. It was one of the many things that would make things worse. A beating was still better than the sonic disrupters they used to interfere with his sleep cycles. There was nothing worse than the pulsating frequencies he could barely hear that left him disoriented, nauseated and mentally drained. 

But when the guard did not let go of his hair, Kylo began to panic. It wasn’t the first time the guards had grabbed him by it, yet they usually let go when the moved him to where they wanted.

“I had given you an order to hold in place,” the guard screamed next to his ear. It didn’t matter that the very same guard had kicked him over. Everything was a test where he was set up to fail. Kylo’s days were filled with meaningless tasks that were impossible to complete, hunger and exhaustion. Sleep was as rare as food. Both were infrequent and never quite enough. 

“I think it’s time I taught you a lesson,” the guard added, a euphemism that was always synonymous with pain.

The grip on his hair tightened, and Kylo felt his entire body tense. He heard the guard reach for something and then the sound of metal sliding out from a housing. For a fleeting second, he saw it in his periphery—a monofiber blade, the same type of knife Hux himself had been rumored to have stashed up a sleeve.

The guard said nothing as he sliced into the hank of hair he has been holding, hacking it down to nearly the scalp with rough and sawing sweeps until the first handful tumbled to the floor. A second guard in the corner snickered as he repeated the process with the next handful, and the next after that.

Kylo gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as he waited for it to be over. He swallowed a startled cry as the blade bit into his scalp and left a bleeding and raw divot in its wake. 

The process only took a minute or two, and when he finally opened his eyes, he saw his hair pooled around him. The air was cool on his shorn scalp, making the raw bleeding areas sting all the more. A trail of blood trickled down his temple and on to his cheek. He didn’t need a mirror to know he looked ridiculous with his ragged new haircut, oozing scalp and jutting ears. He just prayed that they wouldn’t be the next target of the guard’s razor-sharp blade. 

Just when he’d thought they had taken everything from him, they found one more thing to strip away.

The guard couldn’t be bothered to admire his work and turned his back to Kylo. As he wiped his blade against his trousers, he dismissively ordered, “Take it back to its cell.”

Two sets of rough hands grabbed Kylo by the arms and pulled him to his feet. The resistance had been beaten out of him months ago, and he put up no fight as they shoved him toward the door.


End file.
